God is Good. It is a Beautiful Night

 

Look round, brown moon, brown bird, as you rise to fly,
Look round at the head and zither
On the ground.

Look round you as you start to rise, brown moon,
At the book and shoe, the rotted rose
At the door.

This was the place to which you came last night,
Flew close to, flew to without rising away.
Now, again,

In your light, the head is speaking. It reads the book.
It becomes the scholar again, seeking celestial
Rendezvous,

Picking thin music on the rustiest string,
Squeezing the reddest fragrance from the stump
Of summer.

The venerable song falls from your fiery wings.
The song of the great space of your age pierces
The fresh night.

~ Wallace Stevens

The First Commandment: Read! (Quran 96:1)

 

Read not for easy pleasure nor to expiate social guilt but to enlarge a solitary existence.

                                        ~ Harold Bloom, The Western Canon, 518.

A single page of Harold Bloom on just about anything is worth libraries of the tepid moralizing stuff of almost any other professional reader, living or dead.

 

Waving Adieu, Adieu, Adieu

 

That would be waving and that would be crying,
Crying and shouting and meaning farewell,
Farewell in the eyes and farewell at the centre,
Just to stand still without moving a hand.

In a world without heaven to follow, the stops
Would be endings, more poignant than partings, profounder,
And that would be saying farewell, repeating farewell,
Just to be there and just to behold.

To be one's singular self, to despise
The being that yielded so little, acquired
So little, too little to care, to turn
to the ever-jubilant weather, to sip

One's cup and never to say a word,
Or to sleep or just to lie there still,
Just to be there, just to be beheld,
That would be bidding farewell, be bidding farewell.

One likes to practice the thing. They practice,
Enough, for heaven. Ever-jubilant,
What is there here but weather, what spirit
Have I except it comes from the sun?

~ Wallace Stevens

How to Live. What to Do

                                             A Stevensian hymn to Reality.

Philosophical Faith

 

Spinoza's Motto

 

Santayana on Spinoza

 

Why Study Baruch Spinoza with Agata Bielik-Robson

That Grand Old Poem Called Winter...

That grand old poem called Winter is round again . . . .

What a poem! an epic in blanc verse—enriched with a million tinkling rhymes.

It is solid beauty.

—Thoreau’s Journal, 7 December 1856

 

 

 

Susan James: Why Should We Read Spinoza? (Royal Institute of Philosophy)

Wilderness of Stars

 

There were ghosts that returned to earth to hear his phrases, 

As he sat there reading, aloud, the great blue tabulae.

They were those from the wilderness of stars that had expected more....

 

                            ~Wallace Stevens

Rudolf Bultmann: Now More Than Ever

 

It Is Not The Eyes...